uk.railway FAQ |
Dr. Richard Beeching was appointed as Chairman of the newly formed British Railways Board in June 1961 by the Minister of Transport.
His brief was to basically make the railways pay. The first task he undertook was a survey of the British railways network designed to find out which parts were profitable and where the losses were being made.
His report "The Reshaping of British Railways" was published in 1963 and gave an accurate description of the state of the network for the first time.
It had been suspected a lot of the rail network was under used and therefore uneconomic. The report revealed that only half the routes covered the cost of operating them, and that half the stations produced about 95% of all the revenue.
When the "Beeching Plan" was finalised in 1965, it recommended that only about half of the 17,000 miles of track be retained. It also suggested that 3,000 miles should be considerably upgraded.
Other effects were the end of steam traction (although this had started to be phased out with the 1955 Modernisation Plan) and the introduction of container traffic.
True to form the politicians were quick to act on the cost reduction part of the plan and a lot of rail mileage disappeared in the late '60s and about 2,000 stations were closed.
As you might imagine the part of the Beeching Plan that involved the spending of money was not implemented as quickly. Some major schemes, such as the electrification of the West Coast Main Line, were however undertaken.
I hope that answers your question, Daryl. Basically Dr. Beeching was the "Head" of BR and did what he was briefed to do by the British Government.
He is however usually portrayed as being a "hatchet man" wielding the axe.
I feel sorry for him sometimes, but that's probably heresy :)
I think in discussing the "Beeching" proposals it is easy to forget that all closure proposals had to get Government approval - lines were closed as a result of the Minister's approval. And in 1964 there was a change from a Conservative to a Labour Government. The majority of closures were approved by a Labour Government. and by Barbara Castle who, subsequently, in her 1968 Transport Act introduced the concept of a social railway with subsidies to match.
The real mistake IMO was building housing on the closed lines.
Building houses on the track alignment was quite deliberate and apparently often specified in the land sale contract. This was to prevent the line being resurrected in the future.
The fate of the doomed lines was decided by people who expected/wanted their careers to survive the downsizing and had an interest in re-inforcing the belief that the source of the problems lay in the lines to be closed and in making sure nobody else would ever be able to prove them wrong or incompetent by making the doomed lines run profitably.
Which of course is why they did everything they could to scupper the West Somerset Railway and the Border Counties scheme. Both these were intended to run as "real railways", rather than tourist preservation lines. The brass didn't mind the "trainspotters playing trains", but if they ran a real railway and made it work, then people would start asking why they could do it but BR couldn't! So everything was done to sabotage such schemes. This was completely successful in the case of the Borders Counties plan, and mostly so for the West Somerset. I know the WSR did finally get going, but cutting them off from Taunton effectively stopped them running a "real railway" and nearly bankrupted them in the process.
In the case of the WSR, first they sold the trackbed to the enthusiasts, but the Minehead station site to the local council. They naturally assumed the council would insist on turning it into a car park, thereby "beheading" the WSR. When that failed, because the council rented the site to the WSR, they got those idiots in the NUR to do their dirty work for them at the other end of the line. The union blocked the entry into Taunton, because they said that it would threaten their members who were driving the replacement buses. It was obviously a lie, as a fully connected WSR would need more BR staff at Taunton, to handle the interchange traffic, and these would easily absorb anyone laid off the buses. Really the NUR were afraid that the more sensible working practises of the WSR might spread to the rest of the system. As I said before in an earlier posting, the rail unions were much more interesting in preserving traditional working practises than their members jobs!
Of course what is now very interesting (and ironic in the light of the above) is that the reconnecting of the WSR "properly" to the main line is seriously being considered and there is talk of a 2001 date. Funding to the tune of £125K is now being released by the County Council and other interested groups are involved including WSDC and Rank (who own Butlin's Somerwest World). The original emphasis came form a group called TMRL (Taunton-Minehead Rail Link) a year or so ago. There /is/ a connection through the old Taunton Cider company sidings at Norton which was of course used by the stone traffic trains which ran from March 1997 until June 1998 and brought a Cl.37 into Minehead every weekday. But the idea is to have a regular (probably DMU) service. WSR have distanced themselves in that they are not prepared to offer funding help - they have had more than their share of money problems - but would welcome other operators being involved. This is partly due to local pressure because of the increasing traffic levels on the A358 and also the inability of the bus (!) to cope with numbers and the rather convoluted journey involved.
It appears that in many cases:
- fares were credited to the purchase station only
- asset renewal dates were often moved to just after the scheduled closure date, so if the line stayed open it would make a big loss
- no allowance made for costs that would remain even if the line closed (e.g. upkeep of overbridges)
- no attempt was made to bring down running costs (e.g. by using single car DMUs instead of loco+3 on quiet services, or running branches as one-engine-in-steam outside good traffic hours, saving a signalman).
A common comment is that they'd have never got away with half the stuff these days, because people would actually query the accounting. In those days the enquiries tended to accept the numbers at face value without looking at them.
They accepted them because they had to by law! Under TUCC rules it was forbidden to cross-examine BR on its figures - they were automatically taken as gospel. Anyone who tried to put questions on the accuracy of the figures was told to sit down by the chairman, and thrown out if they didn't. Similarly in new road enquiries it was forbidden to question the MoT's figures justifying the need for the road improvements.
The inquiries were just a rubber stamp for government policy. At least one TUCC chairman boasted how quickly he could get the whole thing buttoned up and the line shut.
These sort of undemocratic practises began to change with the inquiry over the Winchester(?) by-pass scheme. As usual, the protesters where not allowed to challenge the figures. However they discovered that permission to go ahead with the scheme could not be given until all the formalities had been completed, so they made sure they weren't. At every meeting they started a riot, which resulted in the chairman closing the meeting and calling the police. Result - no meeting was ever legally finished and so no permission could be issued. This went on for ages, until the bureaucrats finally began to back down about changing some of the inquiry rules.
However the by-pass still got built!
During the Beeching years I worked in the Freight Transit section at York Headquarters. A section had been set up, reasonably enough, to process the closure of branch lines but, as time went on, it changed, without any conscious decision, into an organisation for closing branch lines. When all the original set had been done they started searching for branch lines to close, and that is when figures started to be distorted, subtly, to justify the closures.
I don't think that the people, many of whom I knew quite well, were being dishonest deliberately. It was the normal tendency to think that your work is important and must be got through, even if the figures need to be massaged slightly.
Similar "fiddles" were not new, and started long before nationalisation. The LM&S Patriots were, nominally, rebuilt from the L&NW Claughtons, but there was very little of the Claughton in the Patriot. By doing this, though, the work counted as revenue expenditure rather than capital. I am sure that similar tactics are often used in private industry.
I disagree. He did not achieve what he set out to do and the railways continued to lose money. The answer was only much later seen by governments, viz., that there was no point trying to make them pay and instead they should be subsidised provided they were socially necessary.
By this time it was too late for much of the network. However, some branches that managed to keep going (usually as replacement buses couldn't get to the local stations) have since greatly improved and one can only wonder as to how well some of the prime routes that closed would now be doing had they continued (S & D, Borders, Great Central - and note some of them are down for re-opening which proves my point).
One should also remember the dishonest way Beeching obtained figures to prove closure need. Seaside branch termini like Swanage, Lyme Regis, Sidmouth etc, were closed on the grounds of the revenue collected at those stations only (or any others on the branch) and no account was taken whatsoever of tickets sold say, in London, to get to those places - despite the fact that the latter revenue greatly exceeded the former.
In short Beeching was appointed by a government that doubted rail had any future except for a few trunk routes and commuter lines and told to prove it and ditch most of it. Its been said before but worth repeating: the network was like a tree - cut the branches away too much and the trunk dies. Put another way, few people railhead or catch buses for part for the journey and tend, where possible, to drive all the way, meaning a loss for the main trunk leg as well.
I respect your point of view (and your passion for railways) but the facts do not support your view. Beeching's report was commissioned after vast amounts of taxpayers' money had been squandered on the Modernisation Plan to no avail. The result, instead of the modern, economic railway that had been promised, was a railway that applied modern technology to old services without thinking whether those services fitted the needs of a changing economy.
The British Railways Board squandered £1.5 billion (in 1955 money) on the Modernisation Plan without ever managing to turn around the losses. Indeed those losses mounted rapidly and became unaffordable. The reason the Labour Government implemented the Beeching closures is simple; in 1964-68 the country was in an economic crisis and could not afford to do otherwise.
The sad thing about Beeching is that his report (and his axe) should never have been necessary. The reason why they were necessary is simple; it was the failure of the British Railways Board in the 1950s to identify and tackle the growing problems on the railways. Instead the Board took the easy route and threw huge amounts of money at them through the Modernisation Plan.
IMHO the two massive errors of judgement in the Modernisation Plan were (1) Dieselisation using untried designs from a hatful of inexperienced diesel locomotive builders and (2) massive investment in marshalling yards at the time wagonload freight was in rapid decline. You might wish to add the choice of Dieselisation instead of widespread electrification and application of expensive solutions to the retention of remote branch lines which had never been economic from the time they were built.
It's easy to say that money should have been found for keeping everyone's favourite line/service/locomotive/rolling stock but Governments have to make tough decisions regarding bigger and wider issues such as health, education and social security. Money had to be found for building roads as car ownership boomed and car usage became more affordable. I would not be at all happy if I had to drive my car in 1998 on roads fit for the 1950s - although many of them still appear that way.
Beeching's job was made incredibly difficult by the failure of the railways to have any credible accounting system. You are quite wrong to criticise Beeching for "dishonesty" when the truth is that *British Railways* had failed to appreciate where branch line revenues came from. They were completely unable to identify which lines made a reasonable return and which lost money. They were completely unable to suggest where savings could be made because their financial systems were either non-existent or in a sorry state.
Beeching had no option but to work with the information he was given; it is pointless to blame him for decisions he had no option but to make on the basis of bad information - he could only do his best with the information he was given.
Beeching's brief was to stem the losses, which were unaffordable. He had no brief whatsoever as to what to prove and what to ditch, starting as he did with a blank sheet of paper.
I think the significance of the way in which British Railways - I don't think it was the British Railways Board then - squandered the 1955 modernisation money can hardly be exaggerated. What even at the time seemed to many people to be a failure by railway top management to use the money wisely set the agenda for the railways as far as the politicians were concerned for quarter of a century. Not till Sir Robert Reid was trust really re-established - and then that didn't set a new basis for working because Major and his merry men appeared on the scene with their privatisation agenda.
And look how soon it was deemed necessary to start thinning out the huge numbers of classes and sub-classes of diesel (and electric) locomotives. The less said about the marshalling yards fiasco the better (though in defence it has to be said that other railways were also busy building these huge white elephants at the same time). And what about electrification without modernisation? The EML scheme wired virtually every last siding up to the buffer-stops, studiously renewed crossovers for the old very low-speed values, didn't improve layouts (assuming that new EMUs would have the acceleration of a Black Five on a suburban rake)...
As for Beeching, let's never forget Beeching II - we always remember the first (blue - small format) report, but we tend to forget the very interesting second (orange - large format) report. Beeching and his board had positive ideas they wanted to pursue. They weren't allowed to.
As far as nailing one's own colours to the mast goes, I have no doubt that a significant number of closures was needed -- in a good many cases of lines that should never have been built in the first place in the form in which they were built. It is surely no accident that all other West European countries have or are having to face up to the question of closures as well. But I also have no doubt that there were far too many closure on the basis of those very dubious statistics of lines that should on network ground never have been closed. So I'm in the middle, between the positions taken up by Barry and by Tony.
The interesting thing here, in hindsight as ever, is that Robert Riddles, when he was the CME of BR, set his face firmly against dieselisation, arguing that the way forward was to electrify and pointing out that, if we dieselised, we would then set back electrification by a generation while the book cost of the diesels was reduced. This is precisely what happened in respect of the ECML. It was for that reason that Riddles stuck to his guns over the Standard steam programme. If BR had been able to keep to its stated way of developing the Modernisation Programme - ie by running the Pilot Scheme diesels for 2/3 years before bulk ordering, we might not have seen the railways in the financial mess they got into and might have avoided the waste of huge sums of money which occurred as a result. It was the Government which stampeded BR into accelerating the Modernisation Programme by massive orders for untried (and sometimes unbuilt!) classes and started the worsening financial slide which brought Beeching, who by the way was not a railwayman but a hard nosed businessman, into the equation.
If only that were true. BR completely failed to respond to the massive changes in its market during the 1950s. BR senior management fiddled while Rome burned, meanwhile huge losses rapidly mounted.
Why blame the Government? Government rightly insisted BR act because the taxpayer was having to underwrite BR's massive and mounting losses. BR's chosen response was merely to accelerate their half baked and unnecessarily grandiose Modernisation Plan. Herein lies the root of the problems on British Railways for the next 40 years.
A more reliable source for you this time: BTC report and accounts for 1948 and for 1960:
1948 1960 Route mileage (total) 19,630 18,369 Freight ton miles 21,456,842 18,650,261 Increase in year 0.45% 5.3% Passenger miles 21,259,000 22,270,000 Increase in year -7.6% 3.4% Freight Receipts 181,696,313 247,320,163 Increase in year 16% 1.9% Passenger Receipts 122,572,809 151,274,093 Increase in year 4.2% 8% Total Receipts 337,314,996 478,571,057 Working Expenses 311,057,259 546,223,137 From this it can be seen the market changed little in size between 1948 and 1960, and the indications were that traffic levels were on the increase in 1960, and likely to return to the levels before the poor years of 1958 and 1959.
It is interesting to compare the BTC anual reports for 1960 and 1961. In 1960:
"3. Looking back over the thirteen years of the Commission's existence it may be said that over the first eight years, 1948 to 1955, the finances were broadly in balance. As the report for 1955 pointed out, the accumulated deficit at the end of that year could be wholly accounted for by delays in obtaining authority to adjust fares and charges to compensate for the fall in value of money. In 1956 the policy of deficit borrowing was introduced and the commission did not raise fares and freight rates by the amounts which they had contemplated. The White Paper of that year explained that the expected annual deficits which would be held in suspense on a Special Account set up for the purpose, would be of the order of £50m. a year to begin with. Later the annual deficits would gradually fall until such time as the steps being taken to improve the economics and competitive power of British Railways had restored the position. For the first two years, 1956-57, the results were very much as predicated, but in 1958 the server recession in coal and in iron and steel carryings made itself abruptly felt, equivalent to a revenue loss at the rate of about £30m. a year in 1958 and 1959. Steel traffics have since recovered, but not coal.
4. The benefits achieved from technical modernisation, though well up to expectations, have thus been masked and heavily outweighed by the decline in heavy traffics coupled with the trend in wages and the weeknesses of the freight market. In a Re-appraisal of the situation published in July 1959 (Cmnd. 813) the commission explained why the expected scale of the deficient in the transitional period was being over-run, and why the prospect of breaking even had receded.
5. As to wages, the periodical increases which had been granted in earlier years were quite overshadowed by those which were recommended on March 1960 by the Guillebaud Committee set up to enquire into pay of the railway staff. Although both the Commission and the Government endorse the principle of paying railwaymen an equitable wage, not only were the financial expectations of the Commission profoundly affected, but also the further outlook for the railways was brought into question, as subsequent proceedings in Parliament made clear.....
8.... For the railways alone, the additional revenue cost in 1960 of the Guilleband settlement was about £33m. This figure was substantially higher than the amount which the Commission had in mind when preparing their Re-appraisal in 1959; it more than offset some recovery in revenue from heavy traffics and pushed up the working deficient on British Railways to £67.7m, an increase of £25.7m.......
10..1960 was a year of considerable progress under the railway modernisation plan.... The diesel mult-unit programme, for instance, has transformed railway travel in many areas of the country, but hte modernisation of freight services and electrification take much longer... the full benefits of modernisation... are not realised until large areas of operation have been dealt with. Meanwhile working expenses may be temporarily increased as a result for example of mixed steam and diesel working, and normal running is disorganised by engineering works in progress....
11... Of more immediate effect was the drive for greater productivity which was successfully undertaken in all parts of the undertaking. The speed at which money wages were to rise in a business in which labour costs represented over 60 per cent. of total working expenditure could not be fully foreseen when the Modernisation Plan and its financial estimates were being worked out in 1954.......
13. The year ended with the publication in December of the White Paper... reorganisation.... of the Commissions undertakings..... The Commission welcome the reorganisation of the financial structure which, as they said in the RE-appraisal of July 1959, they have for some time regarded as essential.... the Commission remain convinced that British Railways should achieve an operating surplus within a few years...."
And from the 1961 report:
"5. The year 1961 was not a good year financially for the Commission's undertakings as a whole... £87m working deficient of the railways...
7. Since 1953, the last year in which British Railways can be said to have paid their way, there has been a steady worsening of their financial position, with a deficient increasing each year at an average of about £15m. Last year's annual report included the statement that "... the Commisssion remain convinced that British Railways should achieve an operating surplus within a few years." By the time the report was issued, however, it was already expected that operating losses for the year would, once more, be about £15m. worse than in the previous year. In the event the increase in dept was £19m., the further worsening result from the general decline in the national economy and, in particular, from the fall in the activity of the steel industry.
20. It must again be empasised that stopping trains have long ceased to be the must suitable form of transport for the traffic for which they cater. In the interest of the railways as a whole, most of these services should be discontinued as quickly as possible....
22. ...Therefore, the closure of branch lines should be seen as a part, and only a minor part, of a much wider withdrawal of one form of service and modified operation of another.
23. It is encouraging to realise that those forms of service for which the country still depends and will continue to depend predominately on rail, the long distance passenger traffic, coal traffic, mineral traffic, and commuter services around London and a few other large centres of population, are either self-supporting or potentially so."
If traffic levels were fairly steady, what was the cause for the losses? Obviously the rates and fares were not keeping pace with the increase in expenses. In particular, in 1960 railwaymen were being paid more than double the pay in 1948:
1948 1960 Number of staff 648,740 514,500 Average male staff earning 137s 11d 285s The modernisation plan resulted in significant investment, and thus depreciation. But levels of maintenance were also significantly improved:
Expenses include (in part) 1948 1960 Rolling Stock Depreciation 11,353,884 25,509,241 Civil maintenance 47,974,348 132,077,896 The increase in spending on maintaining the track, structures and signalling is interesting considering recent criticism of the lack of spending by Railtrack.
The big question is, were the closures necessary? Personally I believe not. A significant number of these closures were of heavily staffed lines with significant overheads. The lines that were closed were very different from the similar lines that are still open today. There was significant scope for cutting costs without closure.
The extracts from the 1961 report show the powers that be had already decided branches were to close. The only consideration was whether the lines paid, without consideration of potential savings that could be made in the operation. By ignoring the losses predicted by the Modernisation Plan, and the economic problems, it was easy to justify the closures.
But Beeching make the promised savings? Under the 1968 Transport Act, revenue grants were made to retain services on loss making lines. According to the 1961 report, it would be reasonable to assume commuter lines would not require this subsidy. However the 1971 BRB annual report lists services receiving grants. These include the Glasgow Suburban network, Fenchurch St - Shoeburyness via Tilbury and Liverpool St to six commuter terminals (however, there are few services south of the Thames listed). Despite a grant of over £67m, profits were only £30.2m before interest (the bottom lines was £15.4 in the red).
Political expediency may have allowed the loss of many lines in Beeching's day, and this continued until the concept on revenue grants was accepted. If the idea of grants had been accepted in 1960 (when suggested by the Select Committee), they lines would still be open.